Upside Down
by glitterburn
Summary: Rick ponders on the strange nature of the desert that gave him his greatest treasure.


**Upside-Down**

It was a long way back out of that desert. I'd been around deserts for a while, and I never saw anything good come out of them. That's the point, isn't it? It's a desert. It's dead. Nothing there. At least, that's the way it was back home. There, the desert is a vast dustball where nothing grew, except weeds and cacti. It was home to rats and men on the run, and its borders were patrolled by the law.

Here, though, the desert was the real thing: sand and sand and… you get the picture. It was home to hundreds of nomads who looked tough, talked mean, but could be counted on in a scrape. It was also home to a centuries-old corpse that came back to life, but I guess I'll be keeping schtum on that count. The only people patrolling the borders of this desert were tourists, who'd come just far enough outside of Cairo to feel that their bravery had been tested before they went back to Shepheard's or the Mena House for a couple of G&Ts. Since I've been in Egypt I've met more humanity in the desert than I ever have in the city. Strange, that.

On that long journey back to civilisation – or as close to civilisation as Cairo could be called – I thought about this a lot. When the Med-Jai first attacked our camp at Hamunaptra, my unfortunate compatriots decided there must be gold under the sand; otherwise the locals wouldn't protect it.

"These people value water. Not gold," I said then. Kinda pompous, but I guess I was hoping for that to be true. Last time I'd visited Hamunaptra, my men had been mown down by a bunch of nomads whose interest had been purely monetary. Not that the Foreign Legion's interest in the city hadn't been driven by greed, but that's a different issue.

You can imagine my surprise when I learned that the Med-Jai were more concerned with keeping a lid on their walking corpse than with counting their gold trinkets. I was also surprised when I saw Evie wielding a shotgun, and shooting the damn thing, too. Not to mention the amount of booze she put away later on. She drank her brother under the table – or she would've done, if we'd had a table.

A place of surprises, is the Sahara.

Anyway, there I was, sitting on my camel and heading in a vaguely northeasterly direction, hoping we'd find the Nile before the next sunrise, and I was turning over all of the weird stuff that'd been happening ever since I fell in with the Carnahans. You gotta admit that most of it was kind of topsy-turvy.

Jonathan must've noticed my expression, because he asked what I was thinking about. I told him; and he nodded wisely, his head swaying with each jolting step of his camel as it nearly wandered into mine.

"You know, old man," he said, reaching into his saddlebags and producing the broken bottle of whisky that he'd 'inherited' from the Warden, "Herodotus – the Greek historian, the chap who wrote about Hamunaptra, that Herodotus… Well, he described Egypt as an upside-down country, where the river ran backwards and cats were more important than men, and where the women did their business standing up…"

I took a quick glance down at Evie, who was apparently sleeping quietly with her head against my chest. I hoped she didn't hear her brother's words, although knowing her, she'd probably read all of Herodotus and in the original Greek, too. I coughed to distract him from his rambling.

"It's not just Egypt, though."

"It's a paradox that has afflicted mankind for centuries!" Jonathan said happily.

I blinked. "Excuse me?"

"What he means," Evie said, stirring from her nest within the circle of my arms, "is that help often comes from unexpected sources. Hermits are often considered wiser than those who live in society, yet how can the solitary give advice on living in a community?"

I wondered if this was a trick question. "Uh, because they can see the problem without complication?"

"Without the complications of that society, yes." She beamed up at me. "Another example: academics have been searching for Hamunaptra for hundreds of years, and never found it. It took a fresh perspective – _your_ perspective, O'Connell -"

"I told you to call me Rick," I corrected, although I was kind of used to the O'Connell by now. Everybody called me that, and it was a hell of lot sweeter to hear it from her lips than from the drill sergeant's. "Anyway, us soldiers aren't as dumb as we look. Napoleon, now he knew his ancient treasure, and you can't deny that."

Evie frowned. "Well, no. But he was _French_."

There seemed to be no reply to that, so I shut up for a bit and looked to the horizon and was content with the feel of her body against mine. The saddlebags behind us chinked every now and then, a comforting sound – and a rich one. That weasel Beni had done us a good turn in the end, and I almost regretted leaving him to rot inside Hamunaptra. He'd have done the same to us, if the situation were reversed, but even so… I don't like to kick a man when he's down unless I know he'll be coming up with a six-shooter.

Beni was never good with a weapon, even when we were in the Foreign Legion. He preferred lying and cheating and weaselling to get what he wanted. Me, I just got on with the job and tried to steer clear of trouble. Meaning women, of course: that's what got me into the Foreign Legion to start with. And Evie Carnahan was Trouble with a capital T, but I'm softhearted and… okay, yeah, I wanted a cut of the treasure.

Seems like I ended up with two lots of treasure, one of them with a capital T. I guess that's another one of those paradoxes Jonathan was talking about. I understand this one even less than the first, but hell, this is Egypt. As that Herodotus guy said, it's a topsy-turvy country; strange things happen here.

But not all strange things are bad.

**end**


End file.
